Lander Hero

If you were to forensically search my bedroom circa 1989 - when games were nasty, brutish, and short - you'd probably find fragments of smashed Cheetah 125+ and QuickShot II joysticks embedded in the walls.

To a gamer the words 'Restart/Quit' can invoke indifference, impatience, or rampant fury. Challenge is a fundamental ingredient of almost every game, and so the success of a title can hinge on how many times you see the words 'Restart/Quit' and, more crucially, how they make you feel.

In Lander Hero you'll see them a lot. Really a lot. But, surprisingly, they'll never make you want to smash your iPad against a wall before begging your mum to buy you a new one.

The aim of the game is to safely fly the hero of the title – a bespectacled astronaut who looks like a cross between Nick Park's Wallace and Dr Bunsen from The Muppets – through a series of caverns and onto a series of landing pads.

The stages through which you steer your lander are beautifully rendered, with high-resolution images of planets and dust clouds and galaxies and other space clutter in the background and crisp, almost photo-realistic crumpled-looking rocky surfaces comprising the caverns you have to steer your lander through in the foreground.

To clear each pad for landing you need to collect a minimum number of the big yellow stars that are littered around each stage. As you might expect, you can achieve a star rating in each level from one to three by collecting more stars than you need simply to exit.

You move by holding down one or a combination of the three thruster buttons: 'up', 'right', and 'left'. By default your 'left' and 'right' thrusters are inverted, so that holding down the right one sends you leftwards and vice versa.

As with the 'invert Y axis' option in first-person shooters you may find this method unintuitive, in which case you can un-invert the horizontal thrusters in the options menu. Whichever you prefer, the controls are responsive and the physics feel spot-on.

Your lander has bars for energy, which you lose by crashing into things, and fuel, which you lose by using your thrusters. While you can often pick up more energy and fuel within stages, your supply of both is generally very limited. This means you have to be both skilful in how you control your lander and tactical in how you approach the stages.

Most stages present you with two broadly different approaches. Some let you either play it safe for a small reward or choose a riskier route for a larger reward. Others give you a choice between taking a short but difficult route or a long but relatively safe one.

Adding further depth to the gameplay are boulders that can fall and block your path or crush you, and boxes of TNT that can blow you up or, if you're canny, dislodge obstacles for you.

There are also beams to dislodge, move, or ignore, and crates to incinerate with your thrusters. Because some of these crates contain power-ups, you're encouraged to destroy all of them even though this depletes your fuel and exposes you to the danger of collisions or worse.

Developer Antti Lehtinen has done an excellent job of balancing these different gameplay elements. You need a lot of skill to control your lander effectively, but skill alone won't get you through - you also need to study the map that appears at the beginning of each stage and remain constantly aware of what indirect effect a given action will have.

Lander Hero is hard. It's damn hard. It's so damn hard that you won't believe your eyes. And there's no easy mode, so if you're struggling you'll just have to suck it up and carry on.

Thankfully, while Lander Hero is undoubtedly demanding it never feels unfair. And while your limited reserves of energy and fuel prevent you from frolicking about in a stage indefinitely, you've still got room to experiment with different approaches and take risks for higher star ratings.

Casual gamers may find Lander Hero a little bit too difficult to enjoy, and for those who like a challenge there's only so much fun to be had in steering a landing craft. And despite the various elements that are introduced throughout the game, it can feel repetitive - particularly since you're likely to play the same stage several times.

But these are small complaints. Lander Hero is a polished and well-made physics game. It may be tough, but it's never frustrating - even after you've seen the words 'Restart/Quit' for the twentillionth time.